What Is The Best, and most lightweight Doom Loader?

Greetings, fellow community members! I'm eager to gather your insights regarding the optimal and most efficient Doom mod launcher/loader. I've grown weary of the manual mod setup, like "dood," which sometimes results in mishaps that necessitate a full GZDOOM reinstallation. Your recommendations are much appreciated!

The good old dragging the files to the .EXE.

On 9/19/2023 at 5:36 PM, Randyghgu said:

Greetings, fellow community members! I'm eager to gather your insights regarding the optimal and most efficient Doom mod launcher/loader. I've grown weary of the manual mod setup, like "dood," which sometimes results in mishaps that necessitate a full GZDOOM reinstallation. Your recommendations are much appreciated!

The DoomWiki page on launchers lists most of the popular frontends, and of these, the two most well known ones are: ZDL which is generally considered to be the lightweight one, and Doom Launcher which is the more complex, feature-rich one. The former is probably your best bet although there are some other good alternatives too, have a look and see what catches your fancy.

Here's a bunch:

Cross-Platform:

https://github.com/Youda008/DoomRunner

Windows Only:

https://sobad.itch.io/minimalist-doom-launcher

Just try them and see which one you like best. Boring answer, I'm aware, but you could have tried the vast majority of them by the time you get ten replies here. And keep a few copies of your GzDoom folder in case you run into any other problems experimenting, this way you won't have to reinstall if something goes wrong.

I use ZDL, no problems but I usually drag+drop, as I don't often play with any mods so it's typically unnecessary for me to use a launcher.

Longtime user of ZDL. Never had an issue with it. No reason to change.

I use Doom Launcher mainly because I believed that ZDL only worked with GZDoom. Maybe I should try ZDL if it works with other ports.

32 minutes ago, PsychEyeball said:

I use Doom Launcher mainly because I believed that ZDL only worked with GZDoom. Maybe I should try ZDL if it works with other ports.

It should work fine with other ports, I believe the main reason why it was originally targeted only at ZDoom is because a lot of the contemporary source ports from when ZDL was new (Doom Legacy, Doomsday Engine, etc) shipped with their own launchers, whereas ZDoom did not, necessitating an external solution which would not have made sense for most of the other ports. On the wiki page there is a version history for those interested, as well.

I've been using DOOM Explorer and it is pretty powerfull. Good for finding online matches as well.

I use DoomRunner because it works well and looks great

ZDL because I refuse to switch to anything else. It won't support Doomsday Engine but I hear Doom Explorer does.

Doomsday Engine uses its own built in launcher even today, so there is little need for an external application.

6 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Just try them and see which one you like best. Borning answer, I'm aware, but you could have tried the vast majority of them by the time you get ten replies here. And keep a few copies of your GzDoom folder in case you run into any other problems experimenting, this way you won't have to reinstall if something goes wrong.

 

I use ZDL, no problems but I usually drag+drop, as I don't often play with any mods so it's typically unnecessary for me to use a launcher.

Hello, I usually just use smooth doom, behind anything else, so thanks for your reply, and I'll be using ZDL.

I still use .bat files...

2 minutes ago, magicsofa said:

I still use .bat files...

What? Really, well if works, it works. 

I vouch for Doom Launcher. Doesn't take super long to learn to use it and it works with all source ports (or at least the ones I use).

2 hours ago, PsychEyeball said:

I use Doom Launcher mainly because I believed that ZDL only worked with GZDoom. Maybe I should try ZDL if it works with other ports.

As a longtime ZDL user, I can confirm that it does work with majority of the other ports. The only port that I had a problem with it was Doom Retro.

ZDL is very good. I use it daily.

I also use Hakros. Very good, too.

EDIT: I also think Arachnotron, and Doomie, are good too, but I haven't really used them as much.

I mainly use ZDL because of how easy it is to use, so I would go for ZDL